WTF?: "Seinfeld"'s Michael 'Kramer' Richards in Weird-o-Rama Onstage Meltdown

maybe that should be expected when you do yr mea culpa on a talk show whose host has personified pop irony for 25 years, and (on air)displayed the social consciousness of a newt? (unless the recent Bill O'Reilly stuff counts)

that sounds like a clever ironic joke but he was for real

God, why do I bother, really?

we're not talking about mel gibson right?

I used to be extremely radical when it came to feminism/sexism; but I try to shrug it off these days. I realized that all it did was piss me off and gave me a crap day, y'know, but the other didn't change and would just go on with his day not realizing that I was feeling shitty/angry about it.

Shit,I'm rambling. Whatever.

it's strange, but what IS his responsibility to people as a "public figure" or "beloved sitcom doofus"? i wonder about things like that. if he was some no-name hack comic doing the same exact thing we never would have heard about it. charles barkley to thread.

He's obviously shaken up about it all.

Yeah, shaken up about the whole world thinking he's a racist and possibly not getting any more gigs ever!

i really do think it has to do with the public nature of it. most people don't have nation-wide scorn and ridicule heaped upon them when they fuck up. and this makes people feel sorry for or feel empathy for someone who is the target of MILLIONS of people's rage.

interesting that ordinary people want to 'forgive' a rich and succesful guy who doesn't even know who they are?

i'm sure the tv-familiarity comes into play generally (not really with me), but i also don't regard him as a rich and successful guy, or at least a successful guy. not solely because his persona to the extent it exists is that of an ordinary guy, but because the dude was never more than a sideman and is basically washed-up. and the US v UK thing about wealth.

it's interesting that another public secret this reveals (and maybe is fuel for seinfeld's and rodriguez' reactions) is that 'comedy' at its core is basically a medium by and for losers.

white ppl in general want to draw the line between themselves and 'racists' at like, klan/neo-nazi involvement, rather than just unconscious biases & predjudices

you mean white ppl besides you, right? what unconscious bias and prejudice did he reveal (other than the fact that black people on average have less opportunity than white)?

this is like the guy who hits his wife & then explains he was mad - well yeah, i imagine you dont beat your wife when shit's all good

are you saying that he isn't legitimately contrite/self-evaluating? or that he's done it before?

has anyone mentioned how intrinsically xenophobic Seinfeld seemed? (to non-worshippers only, perhaps) The characters were defined by their inability to look 5 feet past the end of their noses, which is why I found it much more sour and less 'delightful' than its mainstream Show About Nothing hype

you didn't get how self-aware the show was on that score? that was sort of the entire point.

Thank God we have celebrities to remind us that racism, repressed homosexuality, spousal abuse, etc exist at all.

i dont think its a UK vs US thing about wealth, you just think you can only be rich if you have a magnum of learjets

yeah, basically. this is completely OTM.

you mean white ppl besides you, right? what unconscious bias and prejudice did he reveal (other than the fact that black people on average have less opportunity than white)?

you are really straining on this one, aren't you?

In the 15 or so episodes I've seen, not anywhere NEAR enough. If it had been, it wouldn't have been popular.

be that as it may, i think americans of all classes are more wont to regard even super-rich guys as ordinary.

but that's the thing, this idea that it isn't racism unless it's a lynching, you're not a racist unless you wear a white hood, etc. the point is that those words and that assertion of power are all sitting there, with all of their history, accessible to any white person -- or any non-black person, really -- in this society. they don't have the power they used to -- saying "50 years ago we would've" doesn't actually turn 2006 into 1956 -- but they still have a lot of power because of the history they deliberately invoke. it's like this loaded gun that is supposed to be locked up in a museum exhibit and we're all supposed to agree not to use it. when someone goes ahead and uses it anyway, they're violating part of our complicated modern social contract.

and having a racist tirade in public is not in any way like smoking one cigarette or kissing one guy, unless you think cigarette smoking or guy kissing are somehow morally comparable to racism.

nor is it morally comparable to murder, was the point.

I thought Letterman did a good job interviewing him, actually, considering the circumstances. He tried to keep the rambling on track and brought the focus on race when Kramer started to wander off into tangent-land

no, the point was that there's a fallacy in the notion that racist -- or murderer -- is something you are rather than something you do. you can spend all day every day thinking about killing people, but if you never hurt a fly you're not a murderer. you can spend all day every day hating black people, but if you never visibly or vocally act on it, for the purposes of the society you are not a racist. our codes of racial conduct are entirely bound up in how we act toward each other. so michael richards is now a racist in a way that some guy who legitimately hates people of other races but has never once articulated or demonstrated it is not. we get bound up in these questions of essentiality -- is someone a racist in their soul or something -- but those questions are not the point.

I think this is completely OTM.

The question in my mind is, what happens when, in a black-white confrontation, the black person says (in effect) "I think you're a piece of shit specifically because of your whiteness". Does this break the social contract in the same way (though obviously not to the same degree)?

Because it sounds like Richards probably wasn't responding to a racially-based taunt -- "you suck because you're white". But I'm curious as to whether there's a way he could've replied "you're _____ because you're black" -- and not in a soft-pedaled, good-natured way, but with as much vitriol as his heckler did -- or whether it's his obligation to just not go there.

xpost it's a completely self-involved apology is OTM;

the reason he relied on this was because somewhere inside him he believes it

I'm still not so sure of this, I think "go for the jugular" could have been as much as, if not more of, a factor.

i'm not sure about this, so don't think comparisons to murder/murderer are accurate in this way either, altho it is interesting to think about (not me 'murdering people' i mean).

no because that part of the social contract is built around our specific racial history. i mean, there's the generic part that is just, basically, in a multicultural society the resort to ethnic/religious/whatever insults is a generally bad act. but the whole section on black-white relationships is a lot more detailed and a lot more complicated. calling someone a cracker or a white motherfucker or whatever doesn't draw on hundreds of years of slavery, subjugation, rape and murder. but calling someone a nigger and saying "50 years ago we would've..." does. it is an offense of entirely different magnitude.

But that laughing--oh man. A signal moment in the history of television.